Extending a Networked Robot System to Include Humans, Tiny Devices, and Everyday Objects

(1)

M

d

. J

ay

ed

u

r R

as

h

id

E

xt

en

din

g a N

etw

or

ke

d R

obo

t S

ys

tem t

o I

nc

lu

de H

um

an

s, T

in

y D

ev

ice

s, a

nd E

ve

ry

da

y O

bje

cts

issn 1650-8580 isbn 978-91-7668-792-5

Md. Jayedur Rashid received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2003. He completed his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Umeå Universitet, Sweden in 2006. Since August 2006, he has been a graduate student at the Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) at Örebro Universitet, Sweden. His research interests include Networked Robot Systems, Pervasive Robotics, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network, Embedded Systems, Distributed Systems, and Intelligent Robotics. Networked Robot Systems (NRS) offer advantages over monolithic systems in terms of modularity, flexibility and cost effectiveness, and they are thus beco-ming a mainstream approach to the inclusion of robotic solutions in everyday environments. The typical constituent components of such systems are robots, sensors and actuators equipped with rich computational and communication facilities. We argue that the capabilities of a NRS would greatly increase if it could also accommodate among its nodes simpler entities, like small ubiquitous sensing and actuation devices, home appliances, augmented everyday objects or even humans. Combining such highly heterogeneous devices inside one NRS is challenging and one of the major challenges is to provide a common communication and collaboration infrastructure.

In this thesis we have developed methods and techniques to include above mentioned entities in a NRS in a generic way, on peer with other robots.